This week in PopTech: Stories of health, language and living

There's always something brewing in the PopTech community. From the world-changing people, projects and ideas in our network, a handful of this week's highlights follows.

PopTech 2009 speaker Luis von Ahn invented ReCaptcha, a program that uses squiggly characters that humans easily decipher but blocks spambots – and helped digitize millions of old texts. The CMU professor has also made games like Duolingo, that let you learn a language for free, while simultaneously translating the Web. To learn French or Spanish sign up for the private beta, which just recently opened to the public.

If you're in New York, check out this very special production of PopTech 2011 Social Innovation Fellow Bryan Doerries' Theater of War with Tuesday's Children this Sunday, December 10th.

What happens when ambitious and talented data scientists are connected with social organizations rife with data but lacking resources to do anything with it? PopTech 2011 Social Innovation Fellow Jake Porway’s Data Without Borders helps bring these two groups together, using data in the service of humanity to design transformative visualizations and decision-making tools. This week FastCo Exist examined a few examples of Data Without Borders at work.

Jonathan Harris (PopTech 2007) has announced the launch of Cowbird, a community of storytellers, focused on deeper, longer-lasting, more personal storytelling than you're likely to find anywhere else on the Web. Listen to Harris discuss Cowbird in this interview on PRI.